I see in the FreePBX interface that you can give queue priorities. This is helpful when you have multiple queues, but want to give faster service depending on the request. For example, one may put a higher priority on the Support queue, and a lower priority on the Billing queue. This way you can ensure that support customers will get through faster.
I’m wondering if there’s a way to give the queue agent priority to multiple queues. For example, an individual may be a member of several differenct queues, and he may specialize in a certain department. So if a call comes in for this certain department, and there are several agents available, since this person has priority, he would be given the call. On the flip side, if a call is delivered to a queue that this person is a member of, but he has a low priority, it would be given to a different agent.
In short, is there a way to give agents different priority levels to multiple queues?
you are looking for what is conceptually skills based routing. There are ways to achieve this with the Asterisk Queues application, some of it might be obtainable with no modifications to FreePBX, some may require more intricate dialplan and configuration that FreePBX is not currently incorporating.
Within each queue, an agent can be given a different ‘penalty’ and this is one way that you could achieve this. However, you must be aware that a queue will not even try agents with higher penalties within a queue if there are agents with lower penalties in that queue who are available to take a call. From the queue’s perspective, an agent is always available to take a call if they are in the queue and not otherwise occupied. In other words, if they are away from their desk but logged into the queue or a static agent (meaning they are always logged in), then they will be considered available regardless of whether they answer the call or not, and thus no higher penalty agents will be tried).
So … if you can live with the penalty mechanism of queues, you can simply assign lower penalties to an agent who has the preferred skills in a give queue, but higher penalties to them in other queues.
